Walbrook - Culverted Brook Now London Bridge Sewer

Culverted Brook Now London Bridge Sewer

The brook played a role in the Roman settlement of Londinium, the city now known as London. It is thought that the brook was named because it ran through or under the London Wall; another theory is the name comes from Weala broc meaning 'brook of the Welsh'. The stream started in what is now Finsbury and flowed right through the centre of the walled city into the River Thames, near where Cannon Street Railway Bridge is now, splitting the settlement in two. During Roman times it was also used for transport with the head of navigation at a small point known as Bucklersbury building where the Romans built a port and temple to Mithras on the east bank. The temple was found and later excavated during rebuilding work after World War II. The Roman Governor's palace was also found on the east bank of the stream, near its entry into the Thames. The etymology begins soon after when Londinium (also known then as Caer Lundein) was captured by the invading Anglo-Saxons during the late 6th century. Walbrook formed one division in the city: Ludgate Hill to the west and Cornhill to the east.

When St. Margaret Lothbury was rebuilt in 1440, the Lord Mayor Robert Large paid for the lower Walbrook to be covered over. By the time of the first map of the area, the Agas map of c.1562, the whole Walbrook within the city walls was culverted John Stow, the historian of London, wrote about the Walbrook in 1598, saying that the watercourse, having several bridges, was afterwards vaulted over with brick and paved level with the streets and lanes where it passed and that houses had been built so that the stream was hidden as it is now.

The Walbrook's source was Moorfields, north of the City wall which it passed through just west of All Hallows-on-the-Wall Church.

In the 1860s, excavations by General Augustus Pitt Rivers uncovered a large number of human skulls, and almost no other bones, in the bed of the Walbrook. This has been seen as reminiscent of a passage from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (ca. 1136) in which a legion of Roman soldiers who surrendered to Asclepiodotus after being besieged in London were decapitated by his allies the Venedoti, and their heads thrown into a river called the Gallobroc. However, Geoffrey's History is notoriously unreliable, and some historians consider these skulls to be a result of the rebellion of Boudica. As late as the early 19th century, part of the branch that runs from Islington was open and powered a lead mill.

The construction of the massive infrastructure of the London sewerage system with five main sewers incorporated many existing culverts, storm sewers, or sluices. This included the culvertized Walbrook, which by 1860 had been linked into a network of 82 miles worth of new sewerage lines, channeled to the Northern Low Level Sewer at a point near the Bank of England. Many small leaks stream into the rounded sewer for much of the year when the water table is sufficient.

During the 'Carnival Against Capitalism' coinciding with the on 18 June 1999, fire hydrants were opened along the route of the Walbrook, symbolically releasing the river to ‘reclaim the street’ from the "capitalist forces" of city growth which had subsumed it by Reclaim the Streets.

The Walbrook is one of many "lost" rivers of London, the most famous of which is the River Fleet. It enters the Thames at Dowgate.